


void junk

by arriviste



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 08:40:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29329449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arriviste/pseuds/arriviste
Summary: To the Lord of all, Eärendil cried out, “It getstiresome, you know!”
Comments: 56
Kudos: 95





	void junk

Something thumped against the side of the ship.

“Dragon or spider?” Eärendil called out, and turned from the tiller so that the full light of the star on his brow shone out over the fore-deck, which was usually enough to send most foul things scuttling back into the shadow.

There was a thud as whatever had been clinging to the side fell onto the deck. It looked human. Void creatures sometimes did, for a moment.

Yet it went on looking human, or rather Elven. It opened its eyes, and when it looked on them it scrambled back against the stern, as far as it could go, leaving its battered sword where it had fallen.

Eärendil jumped down between it and his wife, his own sword unsheathed in his hand, but it did not stir again.

It also did not wither in the direct brilliance of the Silmaril, which had scalded Ancalagon the Black, and whose distilled starlight had been enough to cruelly wound Shelob in the black passes of Cirith Ungol.

“What is it?” he said. And then, “ _Who_ is it?”

“You see him too?” asked Elwing the White. Her hand rose to her throat, where she had once worn their star.

The outer darkness was more metaphor than description. To the Dawnstar, it seemed a starless night, punctuated by bursts of nightmares and horrors that came snarling out of the dark in a whirl of talons, to be beaten back grievously wounded if not slain outright, but to Elwing his wife, it was sometimes endless miles of stormy sea, and at other times nothing but winter forest, black trees bent over bloodied white snow; and at the edges of it, always, there were Elves with swords.

“I seem to see one of the Eldar where none should be but us,” said Eärendil. But they were not quite Elves, the Dawnstar and his wife; they were both more and less, through blood and by gift.

“It looks to me like the eldest Fëanorion,” said Elwing, and gave a despairing laugh. “But then they usually do, at first!”

Eärendil moved closer to see it better, and to secure its lost sword. Under the grey and the horror there was indeed a gleam of red in the creature’s snarled hair, and when it put up a hand to block the light, it could be seen that the hand was terribly scarred, and that there was no other hand.

“Oh, my Lord,” he said, where there were no Valar there to hear, “have you not asked enough of us even yet?”

Elwing drew in her breath. “You think this was _meant_?”

“It would not be the first time their designs have worked through us to a greater purpose.”

“They surely could not be so cruel,” said Elwing, then laughed unhappily. “But of course they could. Son of Fëanor! Do you know me?”

The thing that had been Maedhros Fëanorion shuddered. Then it said, very low, “I know you, Elwing Dioriel.”

“Does your oath bind you still?”

It shook its head. 

“Did the fulfilling of it bring you joy?” asked Elwing, and in the placelessness of the Ancient Dark, Elu Thingol seemed to speak through her, and lost Lúthien; and Beren Camlost, and Dior Elúchil and white Nimloth, together as they never had been and never would be. And, fainter, the chiming voices of children, thin and wavering, an echo where there should be none. “Did it satisfy you at the last, Fëanorion?”

It covered its face with its ruined hand and said nothing.

The Dawnstar and his wife studied it.

“They ask much,” said Elwing.

“Don’t they always? Yet it is our own choices that open the doors for them. They _meant_ this to happen, or I don’t think we would have found him at all; but the choice of what to do now is ours.” 

It did not move. It did not make any attempt on the Silmaril bound to Eärendil’s brow – no longer with the dragon-tainted Nauglamir, but by a silver band, close-fitting around his temples. Although its light had once scorched the flesh of the thing before them, it did not do so now. Perhaps enough Ages of the world had passed for forgiveness, or else enough had been scoured and sloughed away from the grey thing in the boat that nothing evil remained to burn.

“I have no right to ask anything of you,” said Maedhros Fëanorion in a voice that was still, unexpectedly, clear and beautiful. “Who knows that better than I? If you drove me off it would be justice itself; but if I had any rights at all, I would beg you not to cast me back into the flames.” 

The glance he gave to the Ancient Darkness beyond the star-light made it clear what it was he saw in its depths. 

“ _We_ are not the sort who could,” said the Dawnstar. “Much though we might wish to!”

There was another crash.

“Dragon!” Eärendil cried.

“I see it,” said his wife.

One couldn’t hope to wound shapeless, formless thoughts that had been in the mind of Iluvatar before there was Ëa; the opposite of dragons and of spiders and of all other forms that _were,_ the essence of unbeing.

The mind pressed them instead into something manageable, and what Eärendil saw was a beetle-green beast with three rows of sharp teeth set one inside the other in its jaws, and great wings shaped like a bat’s. It opened its maw to snap at Vingilot’s white sails, and the pale inside of its throat was the same pink-and-yellow found sometimes at the heart of a buttery white rose.

They scarcely needed words between them. Elwing went swiftly to the tiller, while her husband took up his sword, golden hair falling back from his shoulders and a fierce smile on his mouth, and leaped light-footed from the deck into the rigging.

The dragon’s coiled body twisted to strike as Vingilot swung about, bringing Eärendil and his bright sword too near one vulnerable curve of its long neck. 

Elwing turned the ship again to avoid first its jaws and then the great backswing of its tail, and Eärendil sliced with all the long side of his blade and the strength of his arm at the base of the dragon’s throat, where the scales were softest. It roared at him – it was a cold-drake, and flameless – and the slit in its flesh began to leak emptiness, but otherwise it seemed unhampered.

“Give me my blade!” cried Maedhros, and the Dawnstar laughed even as the dragon’s many teeth were displayed before him like a blossoming flower opening its petals.

“I am aiming for its soft places: I do not need to protect my own from you!”

“Let me help!”

“Small help you have ever given anyone,” said Eärendil. Then, “I suppose that’s not _entirely_ fair,” and threw Maedhros his surrendered sword. “Aim for the weak bits: the throat, the eyes, the tendons in his wings; inside the mouth, if you can!”

All these places their swords found; and still the dragon snapped and snarled and tried to strain closer. 

_You think you can hinder me!_

“I am doing so,” the Dawnstar pointed out cheerfully.

Maedhros, blood running between his fingers and down the blade, sliced through one trailing edge of wing.

 _You dare!_

It arched back, out of reach; then, considering, coiled its neck so that it came oleaginously close to Maedhros.

_You think they’ll help you? Fool! They come to cut us down whenever we grow strong enough to leave. They’ll do the same to you._

“They may,” said Maedhros, and thrust his sword up at the delicate underside of its jaw, briefly exposed. It went through scale and flesh and up into the roof of the dragon’s mouth, and dark clots of nothingness fell from it when he wrenched the sword back.

The dragon screamed, then screamed again, wordless in its pain. It drew itself up and, in its lashing fury, made the mistake of gazing on the Dawnstar directly, and the fierce light of the star on his brow seared its eyes. 

It reared back again, hissing and thrashing its wings. It bated like a mad hawk as the light ate into the membranes of its eyes like acid, etching its way through nerves and membranes deep into its skull. Wings failing, it sank away from them into the endless night, bleeding blackness and nothingness from breast and eyes and mouth in inky spirals in its long fall.

When it had disappeared into the dark, there was a great burst of sound and quiet and warmth and cold all mixed together, and the smell both of sulphur and of ozone. 

“That was no dragon,” said Maedhros into the sudden silence. “It was a Balrog.”

“It was neither,” Eärendil said.

“I know a Balrog when I see one! I can still see the after-fire of his flails behind my eyes.” 

“Neither,” Eärendil said again, “though the remedy would have been the same. Nothing here can bear this light. They are all only the shadow of a shadow of a shadow, and the star I carry is the very same, turned inside out. It is the last of the Trees, that were the memory of the Lamps before them, themselves a splintered fragment of the Flame itself. The one cannot stand the presence of the other.”

He left their passenger and went to his wife, who was standing in the prow barefoot and weary, the palms of her hands red with rope-burn and from gripping the tiller. “We have done what we came to do,” he said, and put his arm around her. 

She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Have we? What of him? Are we bound to set him free in the world once more? The Valar, for pity and in hope, loosened Angainor too soon from the Dark Enemy, and think of the grief that wrought! Is that our part here?”

“If it was not,” said Eärendil, “I don’t think we would have found him – irritating as the Valar are in the way they work, and tempted as I am to leave him beyond the Door.”

“Are you?”

“I suppose not,” he admitted. 

“After all,” she said, “you are a hero. How could there be any other choice?”

“There is always a choice,” said Eärendil. “Thinking otherwise was _his_ folly.”

“Let them bear it, then. If we can bring him out, we were meant to; and if not, then it wasn’t meant at all.”

When they broke through the tough skin of the void and seared it closed behind them, the man at the back of the ship was still there, huddled and grey and ruined, but his sword was not.

To the Lord of all, Eärendil cried out, “It gets _tiresome_ , you know!”

Night was just beginning to come on, the brightest of the early stars shining out against the colourless sky. Below them, the Elves of Tirion and Taniquetil and Alqualondë were still awake, still singing, unaware of the burden Vingilot carried and was bringing them.

Elwing shivered. Eärendil put out his arm, and she settled on it, a sea-mew in form. Her claws dug into his wrist.

“I cannot fail in bringing the light,” he said. “And I cannot tarry! So he must come with me tonight; but go and give your warnings, and I’ll bring him home with me in the morning.” 

She groomed her feathers unhappily. “You are a hero, too,” he told her, and raised his arm and let her fly from him back towards Aman until she was only a white shape in the distance, and then could not be seen at all.

They passed over Tol Eressëa with its golden lamps and tall pearl towers, and then through something that was and was not like the layer between the world and the void; a filmy layer of reality that parted for the white prow of the ship like a gauzy curtain as Vingilot entered the rounded world.

“What was _that_?” asked Maedhros behind him, and Eärendil said,

“Something a little after your time – it all is, I suppose,” and spent the evening pointing out landmarks and explaining things from the prow. The seas where Númenor had been, where Elros and his children had ruled for an Age, and what had happened to it. Tol Fuin and lonely Tol Morwen, ruined Tol Himling where Maedhros Fëanorion had once guarded the East.

Half-ruined Lindon, and the Ered Luin, which had barely changed at all. The neat patchwork squares of the Shire and the ruined traces of the Northern Kingdom that Elros’s great-great-great grandchildren far down the line had once ruled from Fornost. Elrond’s empty house at Rivendell, which had been a haven and a light in the dark for thousands of years; and the jagged spine of the Misty Mountains where the Dwarves had been born and which the Green-elves had refused to cross on the Great Journey; where Celebrían had disappeared. Gold-and-green Rohan, and tangled Greenwood, and Gondor beyond it; and its white city that was the shadow of a shadow of a shadow of another, and the King and Queen there, grey-eyed and dark-haired, man and woman, but a little more than that even yet.

Greening Ithilien and still-browned Mordor; Khand and Harad, and far into Rhûn.

By the time they crossed back into the realms of gold, Eärendil’s passenger had been weeping, quietly, for hours, and dawn was turning the pale colours of the Elven-cities of Valinor rosy gold.

“Come,” said Eärendil. “Let’s go home.”

**Author's Note:**

> [blows dust off AO3] Hello! I am still around, and alive, and [on tumblr at arrivisting](https://arrivisting.tumblr.com/). This dropped into my head fully-formed yesterday, and I have not been so gifted with ideas this past year that I can afford to look even a metaphysically-shaky idea in the mouth.
> 
> (I don't think the annihilating reaction of matter and anti-matter is quite what I've described happening to the dragon, but blowing up Vingilot was not my design).


End file.
